Humanism is always the minority school.

From Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul.

Perhaps most importantly, this failure and the confused response to it by those in charge is a reminder that the glory of the West does not lie in economic ideologies or utilitarian inevitabilities or linear process. What is admirable about Western civilizations is the minority school of humanism. Humanism is always the minority school. Socrates not Plato. Erasmus not Descartes. Periodically this more difficult way of living breaks through to the front line and re-energizes us with purpose, enough to carry us through the next ideological era with whatever destructive forces it will unleash.